


well, that's what you get

by pierianabeyance



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: lup beats up sazed in an alley and its great
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 20:24:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11516796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pierianabeyance/pseuds/pierianabeyance
Summary: When Lup was younger, much, much younger, she watched a pair of boys run up from behind Taako and push him into the dirt. And they laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, and Taako bit down hard on his lip because he hadn’t cried since their last uncle shooed them out of the house for good seven months ago and he wasn’t about to start now, and Lup saw red. Lup, young and scrawny and furious, had held out a hand to help her brother off the ground and then clenched that same hand into a fist and chased those boys half a mile down the dirt path with Taako on her heels until she’d cornered them.“It’s not worth it,” Taako had insisted, grabbing her hand and trying to pull her in the other direction, but there was a scrape on his knee and she had already made up her mind.Now, she looks at Sazed gritting his teeth against the wall where she has him held, trying his best to look unafraid, and she tightens her hand into a fist.--OR: Lup Punches Sazed In The Fucking Face





	well, that's what you get

**Author's Note:**

> im gfdkjhg thi s is the most messy piece of writing ive ever thrown together in my life but you know what. it gets the job done. write the ass kicking you want to see in the world. even if you don't Ever Fucking Proofread It
> 
> anyways btw lup has her umbra staff because i wrote her with it before remembering its broken so fuckin, just assume she fixed it and then also made it so it wouldnt Accidentally Eat Her Again, because that was just kind of a careless design choice on her part like cmon lup

**** When Taako was younger, much younger, he was pushed over into the street from behind. His palms hit the dirt road underneath him and his knee scraped against a rock and he heard two voices laughing as he tried very, very hard not to cry. He was young, but he was determined to be stronger than that, because he was done giving the world any of his tears. It didn’t deserve them. Nobody deserved them.

Lup was at his side in an instant, because she always was. She pulled him up to his feet, opened her mouth to ask if he was okay and then stopped when she caught the two boys who had pushed him running down the dirt road, laughing and kicking up dust as they went. Her eyes narrowed and her teeth bared and she took off down the road after them. Taako followed, even though he wasn’t sure what the hell her plan was, because that’s just what he did. He followed her all the way down the road, into the closest village, right into a small alley between two buildings that the boys found themselves cornered in. They turned confidently, still smirking, because Lup was furious but at her age and size by no means imposing. 

Taako, breathless and nervous, reached for her hand and tried to pull her away. “It’s not worth it,” he muttered, glaring past her at them. “Let’s just go.”

Lup pulled her hand out of his grasp, tightened it into a fist, stepped towards the boys and swung.

* * *

 

Lup hears about what happened with  _ Sizzle It Up  _ eventually, because she knows Taako too well to let anything slide and she knows that something is wrong the first time they try to cook together after she gets herself situated in a brand new body (with a slightly exasperated warning from Kravitz that it’s the only one he can allow, so if she could please respect the natural order of life and death from now on that would be  _ fantastic. _ ) At first she puts it down to the two of them being out of practice as a pair, their rhythm off by one or two beats, but there’s something strange about the way Taako’s hands shake while he works. When halfway through, he just starts refusing to touch anything, Lup puts her hands on his shoulders and waits for whatever explanation he’s willing to give.

And he tells her, of course he tells her - this is  _ Lup _ after all, there’s nobody who he trusts more. He tells her about the show, and he tells her about Glamour Springs, and he tells her about his assistant.  _ Sazed.  _ The name comes off Taako’s tongue like it’s burned him, and Lup’s lip curls instinctively at the sound before she even knows a damn thing about him, because that can’t mean anything good.

“It was just...the whole thing was just really, really shitty,” he says, fiddling with the end of his braid. “He was.  _ I _ was. Without you, Lup, I was...pretty fuckin’ bad, y’know. And I thought...maybe after I found out that at least it wasn’t  _ entirely _ me - you know, that  _ he _ was the one who _ actually did the poisoning,  _ maybe this-” he gestures around at the kitchen, the half-made meal spread across the counters. “Would be a little bit  _ easier _ . But it’s just...not. And it hasn’t been for a long fucking time.”

And Lup is  _ angry. _ It almost feels like Wonderland again, like watching Taako being hurt outside and being powerless to do anything but claw at the black-curtained walls and scream and look for a way out that she knows isn’t there, except this is even  _ worse _ because it’s already  _ happened _ . The damage has already been done and the only person she can blame is long gone already, and there’s nobody here for her to burn for what’s happened to her brother.

Taako has never been big on hugging, even less so in recent months than he used to be, but he leans into it now. He rests his head against Lup’s shoulder and he doesn’t cry, because he’s given enough of his tears to this world and to this memory and he’s  _ tired _ of it.

Lup finishes dinner alone that night. And a lot of the nights after that.

* * *

 

Taako tells Lup not to look for Sazed.

“Fuck, it was so long ago,” he says with a light tone and an eyeroll meant to imply that he doesn’t care at all, even though he clearly does. “Don’t waste your time.”

Lup rolls her eyes right back. “Oh, come _ on. _ You can’t honestly tell me you don’t want his ass to get thoroughly kicked.”

“Of course I do! And listen, if I ever happened to fuckin’, cross him on the street or something, I would magic missile him into the next plane over or some shit. But I’m not...I just don’t want to spend my time  _ looking _ for him. And you shouldn’t either. It’s just a waste. He’s not worth it.”

As it turns out, she doesn’t need to.

(Fate has always been on their side, after all.)

She finds him working in a small restaurant in Neverwinter, a waiter working the night shift on the same night that she and Barry happen to be out together looking for somewhere new to eat. They’ve never been to this place in particular before; it just never appealed to them much, appearing rather plain on the outside, but it’s one of the last places around that they hadn’t tried yet so they decided to just give it a shot.

Sazed doesn’t wait on them, but he does pass by, and it’s by chance that Lup happens to be looking at him when he does and catch the name pinned to his shirt as he makes his way to the opposite end of the room. She thinks, for a moment, that it could be a coincidence, it could just be a more common name than she thinks, and she watches him, and she keeps watching him until he turns back around -

And they lock eyes across the room and she  _ knows.  _ She sees it in the way his expression changes when he sees her, the way he looks her up and down like he can’t believe what he’s seeing, or what he  _ thinks _ he’s seeing, and it takes her a moment to realize that he probably doesn’t know she  _ exists _ .

All the better for her.

“I’ll be right back,” she mutters to Barry.

“Is everything alright?” He asks.

She nods. “Yeah, I just need to take care of something.”

It’s not very specific, but Barry trusts her. He nods and watches as she picks her Umbra Staff up from where it’s leaning against the table and follows where Sazed went, towards the back of the restaurant.

When she finds him, he looks like he’s expecting her. Or not,  _ her _ , but like he’s expecting to be followed. He smiles at her, but it’s the kind of fake smile that she knows too well and he doesn’t know how to pull off well enough to convince her. She smiles back, and she does it  _ right. _ She does it perfectly.

“Taako,” he says, and Lup doesn’t correct him. “I didn’t expect to run into you here.”

Lup doesn’t waste time trying to make small talk. She doesn’t confirm or deny an identity. She just smiles and jerks her head in the direction of the back door. “Can we talk?”

If he thinks her demeanor is strange, he doesn’t comment on it, and she can practically hear the reasoning he’s doing in his head. He thinks he has nothing to worry about. He thinks he still has Taako fooled. He thinks he’s  _ safe. _

He pushes the back door open and the two of them step outside into the cramped alley between the restaurant and the building that neighbors it. Lup makes sure to close the door behind them, and she hears it lock as it swings shut. 

“It’s been...a while, hasn’t it?” Sazed starts, the same fake smile on his face as he turns towards Lup. “Taako-”

“Nope,” Lup cuts him off there and shoves him up against the opposite wall with all of her strength, keeping him help there with her forearm pressed against his neck. His eyes widen, confused and a little bit worried which he quickly tries to cover up, and he tries to speak again.

“You’re-”

Lup doesn’t let him get very far. “Not Taako,” she says, and that’s all the information she gives him on that.

When Lup was younger, much, much younger, she watched a pair of boys run up from behind Taako and push him into the dirt. And they laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, and Taako bit down hard on his lip because he hadn’t cried since their last uncle shooed them out of the house for good seven months ago and he wasn’t about to start now, and Lup saw  _ red _ . Lup, young and scrawny and furious, had held out a hand to help her brother off the ground and then clenched that same hand into a fist and chased those boys half a mile down the dirt path with Taako on her heels until she’d cornered them. She didn’t have magic then, she didn’t need it. She stared them down, further angered by the smug looks on their faces.

“It’s not worth it,” Taako had insisted, grabbing her hand and trying to pull her in the other direction, but there was a scrape on his knee and she had already made up her mind. 

Now, she looks at Sazed gritting his teeth against the wall where she has him held, trying his best to look unafraid, and she tightens her hand into a fist.

She reduced Edward to ash in ten seconds. Somehow, Sazed deserves worse.

Taako isn’t here to try and pull her away. She doesn’t think he would even if he was.

Lup pulls her fist back and punches Sazed full force in the fucking face.

It’s pretty awesome.

She very distantly registers a pain in her knuckles that she can’t really be bothered to pay attention to, because there is nothing more that she would rather focus on than Sazed’s hiss of pain as her fist makes contact with his face and the back of his head knocks hard against the concrete wall behind him. For a moment, she worries she’s knocked him out already, but no - there’s more to be done. Lup steps back, shaking out her hand, and Sazed presses a hand to the side of his face where she hit him.

_ “Fuck,”  _ he says, and then before he says anything else she punches him again. He falls to his knees after that one, blood starting to trickle out of the split in his lip, and before he gets a chance to even really react to that one Lup brings her knee up and hears a satisfying crack as it hits his nose. She acts fast after that one too; before her foot is even back on the ground she swings her umbrella around to knock him onto his side, lying on the ground with blood spilling onto the dirt at her feet. She stomps her foot down into his hip, hard, and then uses it to roll him onto his back, giving him the perfect view of the Umbra Staff with its pointed tip positioned perfectly between his eyes.

“So,” she says. “Let’s see,  _ Sazed _ . You hurt my brother. You poisoned  _ forty people _ in an attempt to  _ kill _ my brother, which, even if you take Taako out of the equation, you  _ murdered forty people _ . You’re a murderer, an envious low-life, and, I can only assume, a terrible, _ terrible _ cook. How do you plead?” She pushes the Umbra Staff down and pushes the point into his temple.

He’s silent for another moment, unsure of whether she really wants him to respond. “I-”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

Either he thinks his best bet is keeping his mouth shut or he really doesn’t have one. 

The back door swings open and someone steps outside, closing the door very quickly behind them. Lup doesn’t look over. Sazed dares to look hopeful, for a moment.

“Er...need some help?” Barry asks.

Lup shakes her head. “Nah. You can go take care of the check, hon, I’ll meet you at the entrance in a few. We should probably get going after  _ this _ is...properly taken care of.”

Barry looks for another couple of seconds and then nods. “Yeah, alright. We’ll...yeah. Okay.” There’s a look in his eyes that says more than he does, a deeply rooted trust that goes unsaid, but not unseen. It’s not voiced, but it’s there. He looks down at Sazed, who’s looking at him as well as he can through the corners of his eyes almost desperately, and shrugs as if to say  _ “Whatever’s about to happen to you, you probably deserve it.”  _

And then Lup and Sazed are alone on the dirt path again. 

Here's the thing: Lup really doesn’t think she should  _ actually _ kill this guy.

In the moment, right now, her vision still tinged with red and furious sparks still flying off the tips of her fingers, she really,  _ really _ wants to. He deserves it. He deserves it for everything he put her brother through, everything that he’s  _ still  _ going through, everything that she wasn’t there to stop. And maybe that’s it, maybe it’s because she wasn’t there to stop it - maybe the anger has just had too much time to simmer and it’s boiling over now that she’s really looking him in the face. Either way, he deserves  _ something _ , and the longer she looks at him the more furious she feels.

(It took her ten seconds to _ destroy _ Edward.

But Edward wasn’t  _ alive. _ )

“If I see you again,” she says, very calm, very matter-of-fact, “I will kill you. If you happen to pass me on the street, if we end up on the same train, if,  _ god forbid _ , I ever walk into another restaurant you work at. You won’t have time to turn around. Maybe you won’t even have time to see me too. I will  _ obliterate _ you. I will wipe you off the face of the multiverse, and you will be  _ nothing _ . Do you understand me?” Sazed nods very slowly, very carefully. Lup nods too. “Good.”

She pulls the Umbra Staff back and swings it over her shoulder, stepping away from Sazed and giving him space to sit up. He stays on the ground. She doesn’t offer him a hand.

“You might want to find another job,” she says, sounding almost amused. “This is a nice place. You kind of ruin the atmosphere.”

And she turns sharply on her heels, leaving Sazed behind her to bleed into the dirt. 

As she reaches the end of the alley, she turns, raises her Umbra Staff, and casts a small fireball in his direction. Not enough to kill him, maybe, and certainly not enough to catch the buildings on either side, but enough to make a point.

“Go to hell!” She shouts, and she can’t help but smile when she says it.

She knows that when the time comes, Death will  _ very  _ much be on her side here too.

(Taako helps with dinner the night after that.)

**Author's Note:**

> im @celebitxt on tumblr come talk to me about taz


End file.
